SIGNAL No.13 — AI's inner workings are quietly becoming legible

Today's Signals

Hosted by Oli.

01 — AI's inner workings are quietly becoming legible

• MIT Technology Review names mechanistic interpretability one of its 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2026, citing work from Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepMind that maps features and reasoning paths inside large models — making model internals legible enough to argue about, and reshaping the conversation about safety, trust and regulation away from "trust the score" toward "show the wiring"
• Anthropic published Natural Language Autoencoders on May 7, a setup in which Claude is asked to explain its own activations in plain text and a second Claude tries to reconstruct that activation from the explanation, already used in pre-deployment audits of Claude Opus 4.6 and Mythos Preview — surfacing what the model knows but does not say, and turning interpretability from a research aesthetic into an operating discipline

02 — Compute and culture are picking their places carefully

• JLL projects global data-center load to nearly double from 82 GW in 2025 to 153 GW by 2028, driven almost entirely by AI, with the first site-selection criterion now "speed to power," followed by community support and customer latency — compute as a function of geography, rather than the other way around
• Bloom Energy reads the same shift from the supply side, arguing time-to-power is now the primary site-selection criterion and that a growing share of operators expect to deploy fully onsite-powered campuses by 2030 — the data centre sliding from "building" to "power plant plus compute," the boundary between digital and natural infrastructure starting to dissolve
• Wallpaper maps the 2026 design exhibition year with an emphasis on geographic spread, a return to materials, and shows that take everyday life itself as their subject — exhibitions sliding from spaces for looking toward prototyping grounds for ways of living, the Art and Place axes intensifying together
• e-flux / Sonic Acts carries the announcement of Sonic Acts Biennial 2026 — "Melted for Love" — running Feb 5 to Mar 29 in Amsterdam with about 200 artists, 20 venues and 80 events renegotiating the idea of home under climate breakdown, colonialism and displacement, treating sound and installation as a city-scale studio for thinking with the ears

03 — Nature's baselines are being read on longer horizons

• Earth Negotiations Bulletin / IPBES reports that at IPBES-12 in February, governments agreed on the framing of a methodological assessment for monitoring biodiversity and nature's contributions to people — to be finalised in 2026, with countries reporting against a common yardstick rather than improvising their own metrics, the slow infrastructure for a long Time-axis
• Nature Tech Collective rounds up the nature data products landing in early 2026 — Copernicus's updated 300 m Leaf Area Index and global vegetation series, NASA Landsat × Sentinel vegetation products, the Intact Forest Landscapes 2000–2025 dataset — a leap in resolution that turns slow change in the biosphere into a story you can actually read
• Nature Climate Change argues that long-term planning for agriculture, forestry, water and energy infrastructure needs climate projections well past 2100, since the futures faced by children born today already fall outside today's standard models — a 50- to 100-year time horizon finally a frontline scientific subject rather than a thought experiment
• Nature Food charts microbiome-driven approaches to climate-resilient crops, now operational thanks to DNA sequencing plus machine learning, with beneficial bacteria being engineered to help plants reach hard-to-access nutrients like phosphorus — food becoming the design of the ecosystem just before the body, the Body and Nature boundary moving inward by one step